Topic:weather

For five months in 2015, a team of researchers drifted with polar ice, their ship tethered to an ice floe as they collected data to help them better understand how the loss of sea ice will affect the planet. The air a...

What if massive pumpkin-shaped balloons could bring internet access to rural and remote locations around the planet? Google[x], which also developed Google Glass and Google's Driverless Car, has a team working on gian...

In daydreaming out the window as a kid, Luke Howard began to informally study the constantly changing clouds in the sky. In 1802, he was the first to name cloud forms, as well as a variety of transitional cloud types....

With brand new baby chicks sheltering in so many of their brood pouches, warmth is imperative for Emperor Penguins in the coldest place on the planet. But how do you stay warm enough to survive in -40 degrees or colde...

Why do 'leaves on the line' cause train delays, especially in autumn? The serious danger comes from a series of physics challenges: Leaves are sucked onto the tracks by the fast moving trains. The train wheels crush t...

Can we pull enough water out of the air to sustain drought-stricken places around the planet? It might help to Think Like A Tree... or a Namib Desert Beetle called the Stenocara gracilipes, who harvests water from the...

Biomimicry -- imitating nature's best ideas in our design of materials, structures, and systems -- can provide huge leaps in our understanding when it comes to solving challenges. Example: How do we keep our buildings...

Weather vs. climate... are they the same thing? In this episode of Crash Course Kids, Sabrina Cruz explains the differences: Weather refers to the day to day conditions of where you are on the planet. Climate refers t...

From ZT Research's Tom A. Warner, watch this high speed video of lightning, filmed during a storm over South Dakota:
My daughter got some nice high-speed camera captures of lightning while I drove. We chased a s...

Most hummingbirds weight less than a nickel. Hummingbirds have the highest metabolism of any warm-blooded animal. They are the only birds that can fly sideways and backwards. They hover expertly, too. These are just s...

Playing her electric guitar under the eaves of an abandoned train station in rainy Manchester, England, Sister Rosetta Tharpe performed Didn't It Rain.
An American singer, songwriter, and The Godmother of Rock & R...

Why do we smell that fresh earthy scent before and/or after it rains? With high-speed cameras, MIT researchers have filmed rain drops, and believe that the footage explains petrichor, the "pleasant smell that frequent...

Clouds are filled with so many water droplets that they're actually heavy... like 100 elephants heavy or a 747 airplane heavy! So why don't clouds fall out of the sky? It's Okay to Be Smart's Joe Hanson explains every...

Shot in Wyoming and South Dakota by photographer Nicolaus Wegner in the summer of 2013, this video for National Geographic is an incredible look into the thunderstorms and mesocyclones -- powerful vortexes of air wit...

A grasshopper eats grass, a rat can eat the grasshopper, a snake may eat the rat, and a hawk will eat the snake. When these food chains interweave, they create a food web. Plants and animals (including humans) live, e...

Hexagon-shaped storms exist. There is a massive, persistent, hexagon-shaped jet stream on Saturn’s north pole -- "the perfect six-sided hurricane, 60 miles deep, that could swallow four Earths..."
The New York Tim...

On June 30, 2014, videographer Craig Shimala set up his cameras to capture a derecho, "a widespread, long-lived, straight-line wind storm," as it passed through Chicago. In the speedy time-lapse footage above, you can...

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and host of StarTalk and Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, demonstrates the difference between weather and climate change as he walks along the beach with a dog.
Weather is ...